Our Grand Design in Montemboeuf, Charente, France

Tag Archives: Réglementation Thermique 2012

Over the last couple of months Tom has been working hard to get the planning documents together to send to the Mairie in Montemboeuf. Having never put in a planning application in to UK planners before I am not sure how much more onerous this process was – other than the fact it all had to be in French!

Landscape Plan (showing in cross section relation of building local landscape);

Photographs of site in proximity and from a distance;

Coloured drawing that shows building in relation to surrounding environment

Plan en coupe du terrainet de la construction

In January 2013, the French introduced new energy efficiency regulations called Réglementation Thermique 2012 (RT2012) so we had to submit a declaration (attestation) that our proposed works comply with RT2012. Thankfully, we know a French Architect who has already set up her own practice near Dijon, so she was able to give us a contact for an engineer! He was very helpful and gave us a lot of ideas of how we could make our house as thermally efficient as possible.

Once the application is submitted they have 2 months to let us know if we have been successful or not. If we do not hear with in this time we can take it that we have received tacit authorisation! However, only today did we hear back from the local Mairie informing us that they had received our application on 16th December 2013 – so the countdown to 16th February 2014 starts….

However, they have asked us to show them how we plan to connect to the drainage system and ask that we contact the local ‘technical services’ to discuss the connection work. So once we have confirmed this our 2 month countdown starts. At least this wasn’t a ‘No’! So keep your fingers crossed for us.

We would like to thank everyone who has helped us get this far. Naik in Tom’s office for help with the French translation and application form. Also to our good friend Marine at Atelier Zero Carbone Architectes who helped with the process of the French Planning system. She also put us in contact with Athermia who did our Bbio RT2012 thermal calculations.